M ONER A, AND THE PROBLEM OF LIFE. 687 



reduce carbonic acid furnished by animals, forming 1 therefrom organic 

 compounds of high calorific value ; and that these food-compounds 

 reunite in the animal with the oxygen inhaled by it, yielding by this 

 combustion all the power exhibited in its vital manifestations. 



While this from our present point of view fundamentally errone- 

 ous and most misleading conception exerted an all but universal sway 

 over scientific minds, it happened that, under its influence, so early as 

 1844, our illustrious and veteran scientist and philosophical historian, 

 Dr. John "W. Draper, succeeded in establishing, by a series of beauti- 

 ful experiments, a far deeper and vastly more essential connection in 

 Nature. 



This connection, if I am not greatly mistaken, is destined to become 

 the redeeming thread by which Science will extricate itself from the 

 mechanical maze of rigid resistance and equivalent mass-motion. By 

 dint of so significant and mathematically available a clew, it may in 

 time reach a somewhat more commensurate recognition of effects 

 synthetically secured, of inherent cumulative elaboration, the unforfeit- 

 able boon of specific dynamical influences, which with restless toil are 

 ever busy, widening the scope of qualitative wealth, intensifying the 

 intestine sensitiveness and sympathetic response by which substances 

 inwardly answer the inward call of other svibstances. 



The marvelously slender thread of vivifying connection, traced to 

 its origin by Draper, is an ethereal but most definite band of vital 

 dependence, absolute dependence. It is a truly promethean beam, for 

 without it no life, no fire on earth. You suppress from the entire 

 amount of solar influence calorific, luminous, and chemical solely the 

 yellow rays, and you have quenched life at its starting-point : no more 

 elaboration of organic compounds by chlorophyl-protoplasm, no more 

 food-supply, no more vitality. You have cut off the thread of life, the 

 golden band of union by which the still embryonic vitality of our planet 

 receives sustenance from the mighty parent-orb. This great discovery 

 of Draper the recent researches of Sachs and Pfeffer have only essen- 

 tially corroborated. 



It is here, then, that the knot of organic complexity is being really 

 tied in Nature, and this is, therefore, the exact point at which the 

 mystery of organic synthesis has to be unraveled. A most specific 

 dynamical influence meets here in a peculiar preexisting substratum 

 with certain inferior matter, and under this confluence of conditions, 

 by a chemical process of reduction and substitution, molecular organi- 

 zation is effected. 



In framing my hypothesis of the origin of organic compounds on 

 our globe, I would closely adhere to the above facts. After what I 

 have learned with regard to the yellow rays, I would not expect abo- 

 riginal organic synthesis to have taken place at the bottom of the sea, 

 where all dynamical influences must be dispersed, or so suffused as to 

 have lost their definite efficiency. I would then imagine some probable 



